Collaborate on office docs with NextCloud

If you’re seeking a secure and effective way of document editing within your Nextcloud instance, Kseniya Fedoruk has the right solution for you.

- Kseniya Fedoruk

We’re sure that your day-to-day activities include file exchange and content management. And we wouldn’t be surprised if you’re using Nextcloud for these purposes. This popular open-source sync and share platform offers plenty of functionality and can be installed on your private server.

Nextcloud’s flexible applications ecosystem also enables you to add various tools. Online processing and the ability to co-author documents are key factors when creating a fully-featured working environment. And you can easily do this with OnlyOffice – an open-source web-based office suite that provides you with advanced online editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, which are compatible with Microsoft’s Office Open XML’s formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx).

Document Server

To set up this working environment you’ll need an instance of OnlyOffice Document Server (online editors) that’s resolvable and can be connected to Nextcloud and any end clients. OnlyOffice must also be able to POST to Nextcloud directly.

OnlyOffice Document Server and Nextcloud can run on different systems as well as on the same machine. For the latter option, you’ll need to set up a custom port for Document Server, because by default both OnlyOffice Document Server and Nextcloud work on port 80. Using Document Server behind a proxy is also possible.

The easiest way to start an instance of OnlyOffice Document Server is to use Docker. You can install the latest Docker version and OnlyOffice Document Server with all the needed dependencies by running the following commands: